Black script lettering reading Strength; It's what comes from the madness we survive, tattooed across the upper chest.

Script quote across the upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of black cursive script sit across the upper chest, reading Strength; It's what comes from the madness we survive. The letters have even, medium-weight linework with fine hairline joins, and the ink is solid black with no colour. The close framing crops out the face, and the fabric of a top sits at the top edge of the frame.

Lettering Chest Quote Word Script Strength

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the ink in the well has frozen twice this week, so forgive the blots. Father wrote that you are to stop fretting about the Tern Rock boat. It went down on Tuesday with four men aboard, and the Harbour Master has asked me to sit with Mrs Gorse while she waits for the tide to give back her son. I have done nothing else since, and I have stopped sleeping in our bed.

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Mrs Gorse keeps a tin of lemon drops on the windowsill and offers one each time I come in, as though I were a visitor who might be hungry. Yesterday she told me the sea had found her husband's hymn and had taken to humming it under the door. I did not argue. I simply sat, and when she laughed at her own foolishness I laughed too, and for a moment the kettle sang and the room was only a room. Then she put her hand on mine and said, "Strength is a thing you find afterwards, love. It's what comes from the madness we survive." I wrote that on the back of the tide tables so I would not lose it.

Father says I am too soft for the coast and should come home before the winter closes the road. He may be right. But I have noticed I am no longer frightened of the grey water, only of the day it stops humming, and I suspect that is a kind of courage I did not know I owned.

I am enclosing one of her lemon drops in this envelope, so you may see for yourself what I have been eating. Eat it slowly. It is the sweetest thing in this whole grey county, and it will not last.